Algerian Ballet
A Night at the Ballet: L’Algérie Ma Liberté
This is an older piece that I am still attached to but needs work!
In the distant past - the year 2009 - the Ballet National Algerien (BNA), under their artistic director, Fatma Zohra Namous Senouci, premiered their ballet L’Algérie Ma Liberté(My Freedom, Algeria), which commemorated the fated struggle for independence that was (and still is) in many people’s minds as the foundational moment of the modern Algerian nation. In the midst of this struggle, and in the immediate aftermath, lay the most crucial of all inquiries: what does it mean to belong to a new, post-colonial nation? What does it mean to be Algerian? How can we achieve independence, not only colonially, but culturally? There are naturally many directions in which this line of inquiry can go and these are not the immediate concern of this essay. I am concerned here with the various ways in which cultural productions in dance speak of a certain idea about nationalism and the nation. To abstract a broader nation from this exercise would defeat the purpose. The goal of this paper then is to grant us a privileged insight into how Algerian nationalism operates or even assent to a universally stable concept of the nation. Rather, in living inside this ballet I will hope to give us insight into the nation as both performative and dynamic. Performative insofar as the national is not predetermined but is rather embodied and sought after.